Books, arts and culture

Financial board games

Playing the markets

During the recent trial of Kweku Adoboli, a former trader with UBS, the prosecution described his trades that saddled the Swiss bank with a $2.3 billion loss as “unprotected, unhedged, incautious and reckless”. Sound like fun? Now there is a way to channel your inner rogue, without the seven-year prison sentence.

The makers of “Market Meltdown”, a new board game, enable rampant speculation with borrowed money to play a role in family gatherings during the upcoming holiday season. In the game, you are a trader facing severe market turmoil. As your piece (a private jet) moves around a Monopoly-style board, instead of collecting money when you pass “Go”, nervous depositors withdraw funds from your bank in sums that double with each revolution, simulating an unstoppable bank run.

To keep your firm afloat you need to borrow liberally and play the market, which is represented by a roulette wheel. As loans come due and the bank run accelerates, increasingly desperate bets are required. The winner is the last player not to miss a loan repayment or deposit withdrawal.

Winning traders typically leverage their banks to obscene degrees, delaying their day of reckoning only marginally longer than their rivals. “Ultimately, the meltdown will wipe everyone out,” says Will Sorrell, one of the game’s co-creators. Despite this somewhat fatalistic conclusion, a series of reorders by Fortnum & Mason, a London department store that stocks the game, suggests that people are eager to put themselves in Mr Adoboli's shoes.

More than five years after the start of the financial crisis, the era-defining downturn is steadily making its way into popular culture—from the films we watch to the novels we read and the games we play. When even the plot of “Margin Call”, an Oscar-nominated film, can hinge on the fate of mortgage-backed securities, it comes as less of a surprise that a board game, aimed at players aged 12 and up, name-checks quantitative easing (drawing the QE card in “Market Meltdown” results in everyone receiving a wedge of free money from the central bank).

If you fancy yourself more of a dealmaker than a trader, another game worth a look is “Billionaire Tycoon”, in which you start with a small bank loan and build a business empire via partnerships, hostile takeovers and outright sabotage (see our review). At the more satirical end of the scale, in “Crunch” you are a bank CEO looking to siphon as much money from your own firm as possible. The winning banker in “Bailout!” is the one whose firm amasses the most debt before pleading for a government rescue. “Collapse!” (a variation of Jenga) has a notable event from the crisis etched on each piece. Most video games feature only tenuous links to post-crisis finance, unless, of course you think the zombie-banker apocalypse is nigh.

The granddaddy of all financial games, “Monopoly”, is also in line for a 21st-century makeover. Although the game itself will continue to reflect its roots in the Great Depression, Ridley Scott, a director, has been rumoured to start production on a film adaptation of the franchise, reportedly based on the recent housing crisis. Subprime mortgage-linked derivatives were not available to Rich Uncle Pennybags in the 1930s, but it is not hard to imagine that the old rogue would have been an enthusiastic trader.

Market speculation and government bailouts are merely the latest fads in finance. Whereas ripping off your client has been the enduring theme. I think it's important for our board games to reflect that!

One game that definitely should be on your list is "Greed, Incorporated" by the Dutch board game company Splotter Spellen. It's a modern strategic "eurogame", aimed at hobbyists rather than family gatherings. The winner is the person who manages, via creative business dealings, to run to the ground most of his companies, while amassing the biggest bonuses. (I'm not associated with Splotter Spellen. I just love the game.)

The Shanghai Composite Index (SCI) has been rallying and is up 9.3% this year as of Thursday, which is ahead of the Dow Jones Industrial and just below the S&P 500.

However, playing the Chinese capital markets involves excessive political and economic risk. The country is also stalling, but continues to grow well above other global regions, including Europe and the eurozone. My investment advice is that you need to build a well-diversified portfolio that would enable you to play Chinese growth stocks, especially small-cap stocks.